Chapter 17. Strikes, Truck, Cash

Credits

Chapter 7 of the author's Navvyman, which Coracle Press published in 1983. It appears in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Directions

Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.

Text in italics contains the words of the author's father, who became a navvy in 1903.

Non-bibliographic notes appears as text links.

The source of much of the material should be clear from the text, If the name of a single-work author (like Barrett, or Anna Tregelles,
or Katie Marsh) is mentioned in the text, the title of the book can be
picked out from the bibliography. In addition, a list of sources appears at the end of each chapter

alker once broke a strike at the Severn tunnel in less than a week.
The Great Western men he inherited with the contract had a grudge
against him from the beginning — until he took over they worked
leisurely eight-hour shifts: firing a shot, taking a break, shifting the
muck, knocking off. Walker wanted a longer day with two tight
meal breaks, making for efficient ten-hour shifts. Shots would be
fired before snap-time to let the fumes clear while the men did
something at least marginally useful to Walker, like feeding
themselves.

One Saturday in May 1881, a notice was chalked over the main
shaft. 'I hope the bloody bond will break, and kill any man that goes
down to work.' The night men wouldn't go down — instead they
went to the pub and came back sullen and untalking. Walker left his
office.

'Now what do you fellows want?' The men shuffled. "Now tell
me what you want?' Walker said again, 'and don't stop hanging
about here.'

One said: 'We wants the eight hour shift.'

'My good men, said Walker, 'you'll never get that, if you stop
here for a hundred years. You'd better get your money as soon as
you can, and go.'

They went, though not far. On Tuesday Walker laid off the
carpenters and blacksmiths — who straightaway threatened the
strikers with a good hiding. Thursday and Friday the strike began
to crack: next week it broke apart.

Turn-outs or strikes on canals were usually broken, rather than
settled, by locking-out the strikers and hiring new men. More often
than not it worked. It was the way Mr Cartwright, assistant
engineer on the Lancaster, broke the strike for more pay on the
Lune aqueduct in the Spring of 1794. The new men were content
enough, or cowed enough, till harvest time, when they struck.
[167/168]
'Mr Cartwright,' Archibald Millar, the resident engineer,
reported1, 'endeavoured all that he could to have all the Carpenters
& Labourers at work, flattering them with Encouragement of Beer
on the one side and threatening those who did not come should
have no more Employment at the Aqueduct. The Scots men,
Particularly the Carpenters, paid no respect.' He added, 'I hope and
expect a little time will correct these combinations. The Harvest will
not last always.'

Harvests and navvy-shortages caused by the Napoleonic War
sometimes gave the men the upper hand, briefly. (Sir Charles
Morgan, in 1793, asked Parliament to compel navvies to harvest his
barley at wages he fixed. 'I despair of getting in the corn,' he threw
up his hands when the Commons threw out his Bill at its First
Reading.) Men boating muck to the Lune 'turned out for larger
prices' in 1796 and, perhaps because of wartime labour shortages,
they may have won — a few weeks later Millar grumbled that wages
were now so high the boat emptiers would no longer work
full-time.
On railways it was much the same. Strikes were rare, and rarely
successful. (The corollary of navvy freedom was that they were
solitary men. They were not joiners, or combiners.) Men on the
Slamannan and Edinburgh and Glasgow Junction struck for more
money early in 1846. Soon, half of them wanted to go back to work,
except they were frightened of the half who didn't. Police were
brought in from Falkirk and the men who still wanted to strike were
fired. Dozens of little flash-strikes in the '40s were like it.

In 1886 the Manchester Guardian reported that men on the
Thirlmere dam had struck for more pay. 'Large numbers of men are
flocking to the district seeking employment,' the story ended. So,
presumably, did the strike.

Until the end of the 1850s a navvy would have been quite rich
with a lot less than his nominal pay — if the weather had let him earn
it, and if truckmasters, sloping gangers, gangers with crooked
measuring sticks, and the long gaps between pay-days hadn't
robbed him of it.

Truck on public works was probably as old as navvying. 'It has
[168/169]
been the custom for the last hundred years,' said Peto a little
inaccurately in 1846, 'ever since they commenced making canals.'
(Some canals we know were sensitive about their officials selling
things to navvies. James Hook, a counter (a kind of timekeeper), on
the Hereford and Gloucester had his wages raised in 1793 to
persuade him not to. He was later fired for asking for more.)

Truck, the word, comes from a Norman-French verb meaning to
shop or barter, and as a way of cutting wages — by paying workmen
in goods rather than coin — it dates at least from the early 15th
century when Colchester Corporation banned it in their town. 'No
weaver shall be compelled to take any merchandise or victuals for
his wages against his will, but only gold or silver.'
Pre-nineteenth century truckmasters characteristically gave
overpriced goods or groceries in place of money. Workmen either
ate their wages or sold them at a loss. Either way it was a pay cut.
Nineteenth century truckmasters on the other hand more normally
gave money wages, as long as most of it came back across their
truck-shop counters. The image is irresistably Dickensian; grubbily
mittened, multi-caped creatures fingering iron-bound coffers
smeared with candle grease.

At first sight, truck as practised on public works seems less
grasping than elsewhere: only men drawing subs in the long pay
gaps were forced to accept it — if you could last two, four, six, eight
weeks without pay, you got full money wages. But if you needed
money between pay days — if you had debts, a drink habit, were a
gambler, or the pay gap was just too long — you were given a ticket
which was worthless anywhere but in the truck-shop.
Truck, as practised on public works, seems to have come from
the coalfields, brought in perhaps with the colliers who worked the
early canal tunnels. A Royal Commission looking into truck in
1871 took as an example a colliery in South Wales. What they found
was very like what happened on public works. Pay day at the pit
was the second Saturday in the month. In between were official
draw-days when you could pick up — in cash — some of your wages.
Between the draw-days were the lie-days when money already
earned lay in the company's books. Cash could never be drawn on
lie-days. Instead you were given tommy tickets, usable only in the
company's overpriced store. (Overpriced, apologists claimed, to
finance what amounted to a loan to the miner and to pay for the
clerks' extra work.)

The tommy ticket told the counter clerk how much the collier's
[169/170]
wife could spend. When she'd ordered what she wanted, the
counter clerk chalked the price on the cover of an advance book
which she took to the cashier who gave her cash to that amount.
Then she went back to the counter clerk, gave him the money and
collected her groceries. People who slipped away clutching the cash
and abandoning the goods were called slopers, the origin
presumably of the word on public works.

On public works, similarly, you could sub only out of your lying
time — untouched earnings lying to your credit in the company's
books or the ganger's faulty memory. The ganger wrote out a
tommy ticket, often on a crudely printed chit like the one from the
Edinburgh-Hawick railway shown to the 1846 Committee.

Work ..... Borthwick . . 184 ...

Mr Govan,

At the request of ...... No ...... give him goods to the
amount ...... to account, or in advance of wages that may be
due to him by Messrs Wilson and Moor, and place the same to
their debit.

By appointment.

At the Summit tunnel, where the pay gap was not uncommonly
nine weeks, beer-tickets were easier to get than tommy tickets. You
could get a tommy ticket only at fixed times: beer tickets were
yours for the asking, up to and even beyond your lying time.

Beer tickets were good only in the bagman's own trackside
tom-and-jerry or in a pub where he'd done a deal with the landlord.
Either way, the barmen kept the score and since the navvy was often
illiterate and in any case always drank to get drunk, he had no way
of checking he wasn't being cheated. Frequently he was. Tommy
tickets, likewise, were good only in the hagman's own store, or in a
shop where he'd done a deal with the shopkeeper — generally a ten
per cent commission on all captive navvy business. Even if the
navvy asked for cash, he was given a cashable ticket out of which a
penny in the shilling was docked as commission.

They give us great wages,' said a navvy at the Summit tunnel in
the '4o0, 'but they take it all from us again.'

Four theories have been put forward to explain truck. Perhaps
the least likely — but most widely believed at the time — saw it as a way of controlling drunkenness. Others saw it as a way of binding
the servant to his master through debt. A third theory said it was
because of a shortage of small coins and a poorly developed system
[170/171]
of personal credit. (Which may have been partly true on canals.
Pinkerton paid his men on the Basingstoke in tokens, presumably
because of a lack of coin, and before they went on the rampage the
Sampford Peverel rioters had trouble changing their tokens for
cash.) But perhaps the most reasonable (perhaps even the real)
reason for truck fits public works most comfortably. Truck, says
this theory, needed two things — unmoneyed masters and
high-earning workers. Unmoneyed masters, by dictionary definition, couldn't pay money wages, but credit for goods and groceries
was easy to come by. This theory, then, predicts that truck would
be practised not by the big and rich but by the small and poor: and
everywhere this does seem to be true — butties in coal-pits,
petty-foggers among nailers, bagmen in the hosiery trade,
ganger-hagmen on public works. Until nearly the time of the
Crimean War, hags were often only navvies able to supply and
subdue a gang of men. Truck's culprits and victims were navvies.

And hags often were victims. Head-contractors defrauded them.
One ganger on the Trent Valley line in the 1840 nearly starved to
death when his contractor refused to pay him, denying they had
ever agreed a contract to alter the bed of a stream. Corrupted
witnesses called to corroborate the contractor's testimony refused
to perjure themselves when they reached the witness box. But, 'You
have no jurisdiction,' the contractor told the court, walking away
free.

John Deacon told the 1846 Committee he had kept tommy-shops
on several sub-contracts. He was under-capitalised, the head
contractor paid him once a fortnight and he needed some way of
paying his footloose navvies. Tickets were a sort of paper money:
men about to leave sold them at a loss to people with money who
were staying. 'Though you got', Deacon admitted, 'better men for
Sometimes bad luck forced good contractors into truck. Anna
Tregelles knew one in South Wales in 1847. At first he did all right
and paid cash wages. Then he took on a second contract which
turned out to be all wet muck and contrary rock. Blasting shot
fountains of top soil in the air but left the rock uncleft. In summer it
wasn't too bad. He switched men from good to bad contracts and
everybody made money. In winter, the good high-earners wouldn't
work the bad ground. The contractor got poorer. He opened a
tommy shop to get his money back. At first he paid half in cash, half
truck. Money got scarcer, his food poorer. Meat was
[171/172]
discontinued. Thin strips of poor bacon took its place. Soon his
tickets were worth only half their face value when it came to things
like boots. Good navvies left. Make-shift men, previously
unemployable, were taken on.

Altogether Parliament brought out twenty-eight pieces of
anti-truck legislation though the Truck Act is generally thought of
as the one Edward Littleton introduced in 1831. Littleton was MP
for Staffordshire where truck was most rampant, particularly
among nail-making petty-foggers, iron-masters and coal-owners of
the smaller sort. Littleton was an owner of the bigger sort, out to
ruin his little truck-mastering competitors. The Bill itself was
largely drafted by William Huskisson, a man better known as the
first railway accident statistic, killed as he was by a loco the day the
Liverpool-Manchester opened.
The Act in fact was pretty ineffective, seeing that all prosecutions
were private and not many folk wanted to litigate themselves on to a
bosses' blacklist. Besides, bad as truck was, it was better than no
wages.
This Act as well missed out navvies. 'At the time my Bill was
passed,' Littleton said, 'several Railways and Canals were being
constructed, where it was necessary for the Contractors to have
shops. I could not resist the Appeal made to except their cases.
Perhaps the same reasons do not exist now.

They probably didn't exist in 1831 either. Shopkeepers would
wait in a wildnerness if there was money at the end of it, Peto
implied to the 1846 Committee. He told them, 'At one place I saw
several butchers' carts, loaded with meat, and the butchers' men
crying out 'Who wants a fine leg of mutton?' At Ely you'd see thirty
or forty bakers' carts, all piled up with bread, going into the Fens on
Saturday, to supply my men.'

But even though the 1831 Act didn't apply to public works there
were at least three prosecutions under it.
A hag called Riley took a sub-contract under a man called
Warden on the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton. Warden
paid in tommy tickets: Riley sued under the Truck Act; the case was
tried at Gloucester Summer Assizes, 1847. The Judge began by
ruling the case could be heard because, although the contract was to
make a railway cutting, clay from it was used to make bricks and
brickmakers came under the Truck Act. The jury ruled that Riley
was an employer, not a labourer: the fact that he navvied alongside
his men was immaterial — he still expected to make a profit from
[172/173]
their work. The Judge gave him leave to appeal to the Court of
Exchequer to get his debt settled in coin as well as groceries, but the
Exchequer Court judges also ruled he was an employer, that
employers were excluded from the Act, and that he could therefore
be paid in goods.

The other case was tried a year or so later in Grimsby, where the
tommy shop on the dock was the contractor's afterthought: cash
wages had been paid long enough, in 1850, to give local shopkeepers
a taste of navvy money. So when Hutchings, the contractor, set up
his own tommy shop, Grimsby's tradesmen set up a Reform
Association to challenge it. William Parker, shopkeeper, took a
ticket from a dock navvy in payment of an account and asked
Hutchings to cash it. All Parker had to do in court was prove that
Hutchings refused to do so.
Hutchings claimed the case was not covered by the Act and
brought in witnesses, timekeepers, hags, and other time-servers, to
speak in favour of the tommy system. All twelve hundred men at
the dock were happy with it, they claimed. 'If this were correct,'
said the Wolverhampton Chronicle, 'why were not some of these
men brought to prove the fact? The poor fellows are paid monthly
in cash, if they can wait so long. If not, they must either take tommy
or starve.'
Judge Smith found against Hutchings. 'I never gave a decision
with greater pleasure and satisfaction to my own mind,' he said,
'and this I do fearlessly, feeling satisfied that I have tangible grounds
for the validity and legality of the verdict.'

Some magistrates, too, inclined to common justice whatever the
law said. In the 1850s William Palk, a gentleman of no fixed
employment, advised navvies who couldn't get cash, even as change
in a truck transaction, to sue their contractor in the Exeter
Guildhall. More than that, he found a lawyer to plead their case.
The magistrates found for the men and made the contractor give
them their money, which he did just before firing them, and just
after parading an unruly bunch of drunks through the streets
waving banners proclaiming how good his truck shop really was.
Stafford Prince, who lost his job, gave Palk a pair of singing
canaries.

Legally, navvies didn't come under the Truck Acts until 1887 by
which time truckmasters were in any case long gone from public
works, put out of business by the new big contractors. Right from
the beginning, in fact, the truckmaster's end was in the hands of
[173/174]
engineers like Brunel who had anti-truck clauses written into his
contracts ('if you can trust a man for a shilling's worth of provisions
you can trust him for a shilling'). Brunel's anti-truck clauses don't seem to have worked too well. The same flaxen
haired navvy Mayhew met in Cripplegate told him: 'After I left the Brummagem
line, I went on to the Great Western. I went to work at Maidenhead. There it was the same system, and on the same rules — the poor man being fleeced and made drunk by his master.' Peto seems to have been effective, for he
only sub-contracted to moneyed hagmen, each of whom
had to deposit a tenth of his contract price (some were worth £3000)
in token of keeping the rules. The rules were strict: no truck to
begin with, and weekly pay. Timekeepers told the office on Friday
afternoons what the week's wages were going to be and coin in
sealed bags was ready for the gangers by noon next day.

"You are not aware,' Peto asked a witness called before the Select
Committee examining the 1854 Payment of Wages Bill, 'that on
17/20ths of public works, the truck system is abolished by the
contractors themselves ?' In spite of the curiously precise arithmetic
he was probably right. Truck certainly didn't bother the union
when it was formed, any more than did the sloping gangers and the
long pay-gap which so exercised the 1846 Committee. In all cases
the cause was the same: the penniless hag.

Penniless hags, as well, made it unlikely a navvy was ever paid
what he earned. The long pay-gap, itself, was a device for confusing
the unlettered man about what he was owed and some people ended
the month owing money to the truck-ganger. Men were paid,
half-drunk, in small coins picked out of a basin in the middle of a
taproom, then hustled away to count it in a corner. If a man was
short-paid it was his word against the ganger's and his henchmen.
And if all else failed, the ganger could just refuse to pay anything
and, since the contracts they made between themselves were not
covered by law, the navvy had to put up with being robbed. It all
made what a navvy was supposed to be paid slightly academic.

Proto-navvies on the Bridgewater are said to have got tenpence a
day — five shillings a six-day week. In November, 1774, the Chester
committee ordered: That the Daywage Men on the Canal be paid
only 16d per Day for the best Hands and Others hired as Low as
they can.' The strike on the Lune in 1794 was for fourteen shillings
a week and a ten-hour shift, which may mean they already earned
ten or twelve shillings.

The wages of contemporary farm labourers varied with distance
[174/175]
from London. In the 1790s a Berkshire farm hand could expect to
earn seven shillings a week for most of the year, ten shillings at
harvest time. In Kent he could expect nine to ten shillings
throughout the year. But in remoter Westmorland a man, his wife
and three children between them could expect only eleven or twelve
shillings a week. On his own, the man's wages were probably five or
six shillings.

The Napoleonic War doubled prices from threepence to sixpence
for muck shifting, but navvies' wages went up only locally. Men on
war-work on the Royal Military Canal still only earned thirteen and
sixpence a week in 1807. On the Caledonian some got only eighteen
pence a day — nine shillings a six-day week. But when Thomas
Thatcher advertised for diggers at the Floating Harbour in Bristol in
1804 he promised at least five shillings a day. If not, 'I will advance
the price of work so that every good workman I may employ shall
get such wages.'
'You cannot get a good Navigator under three shillings a day,'
George Stephenson said in 1832.
Henry Palmer, an engineer who employed Navigators on the
London Dock in 1832, said, 'Eighteen shillings was the lowest I
paid, (even for Irish labourers.)'.

Between 1847 and 1877 beef prices rose nearly forty per cent.
Mutton went up fifty per cent, potatoes, a hundred per cent. Rents
doubled. Mechanics wages rose by fifty per cent. Labourers' — not
navvies' — by sixtv-four per cent.

Comparable weekly wages

Year

1843

1846

1849

1851

1855

1857

1860

1865

1866

1869

Getters
(pickmen)

16/6

24/-

18/-

15/-

19/-

18/-

17/-

19/-

20-

18/-

Fitters
(muck shifters)

15/-

22/6

16/6

14/-

17/-

17/-

16/-

17/-

18/-

17/-

Masons

21/-

33/-

24/-

21/-

25/6

24/-

22/6

24/-

27/-

27/-

Common labourers between 1851 and 1869 earned from
ten-and-six to twelve-and-six a week. Coal-getters got between
fifteen and twenty shillings.

Translating old money into modern equivalents is difficult, but
perhaps twenty 1845 shillings roughly approximated to twenty-five
[175/176]
1980 pounds. At the top of their tide, therefore, the nineteenth
century navvy only earned around £50 a week at 1980 rates and even
then he needed to work at least fifty per cent longer. Adjusting for
hours worked, the navvy's best wages were perhaps as little as £20 a
week at today's rates. Not a lot when you consider how it was
earned: lifting over two hundred tons of matter over your head
every week, sledge-hammering drills by candle-light, straining up a
barrow-run with the weight of muck stretching your shoulder
muscles till you thought they'd never pull back into shape again.

1846 and 1866 were the peak years for navvies. Never again in
peacetime did they do so well either relative to the cost of living, or
to what the rest of the country earned. Men at Thirlmere and on the
Manchester Ship Canal in the late 1880s and early 1890s still only
got fourpence-ha'penny an hour — twenty shillings a sixty-hour
week. In the depression of the early 1880s, in fact, John Ward
claimed there'd been an actual reduction in wages which in the
south western counties were down to between half-a-crown and
three-and-sixpence a day. He had himself worked on the Swindon
and Marlborough for half-a-crown, sixpence less than the men of
fifty years ago.

Between 1902 and 1909 the cost of living rose by four or five per
cent; between 1909 and 1913 by nine per cent. Wages by now were
not uncommonly fivepence or sixpence an hour, even sevenpence in
London. Men at the Alwen dam in North Wales were offered
sixpence-ha'penny an hour in 1913, the year the Union persuaded
firms in Birmingham to pay sevenpence for the first time
(thirty-five shillings, that is, for a sixty-hour week).

These of course are fixed hourly rates. Navvies themselves
preferred either the butty system or payment by the piece of work
done. Contractors preferred paying by the yard. 'The reason is
quite plain,' said John Ward. The hole gets all shapes, and the
navvy is unable to measure it; the contractor's agent measures it,
however, with the result that if you count the waggons this week,
and get so much money, next week you may send out more
waggons and get less wages.' But, unswindled, piecemen earned the
most. Piecemen working in Chat Moss on the Liverpool and
Manchester earned up to the three-and-sixpence a day as early as
1827.

The Great War raised wages more than did the one against
Napoleon. In 1917 men on new canal works at Rood End Lane, in
Birmingham, were offered tenpence-ha'penny an hour with
[176/177]
bonuses for good timekeeping.
After the War things were never the same again. Wages now were
fixed by a Civil Engineering Construction and Conciliation Board
who graded jobs in classes from V to I, with a special London rate
above that, according to how urbanised an area was. The Union,
now the Public Works and Constructional Operatives', along with
other societies representing public works men (such as the
Transport and General Workers') had to get jobs reclassified to get
more pay. In the winter of 1920 the PW&CO won an increase for
men at the Hurstwood dam near Burnley by convincing the
Industrial Court the dam was in a congested area. Wages went up to
two-and-a-penny an hour. In 1923 the TGWU took credit for
getting Harwich reclassified as a Grade III (small industrial) town
with a farthing an hour increase in wages.

Wages were index-linked and when in 1930 the cost of living
dropped four points, wages, according to the Working Rule
Agreement, had to drop an ha'penny an hour. The Trade Union
side put in for a penny all round increase which was accepted by the
Employers' Federation and eventually the Conciliation Board, on
which both sides had representatives.

Comparable yearly wages

Occupation

1906

1924

Coal-getter

£112

£80

Carpenter

£98

£191

NAVVY

£78

£150

Farm labourer

£48

£82

These, though, are best-case wages. In reality few men earned
that much consistently. Bad weather halted all earnings for nearly
half of 1871 on Firbank's Lichfield and Croxall contract.
Twenty-four days were worked in May, the best month; only
twelve in February, the worst.

The Irish as well, often worked for less — one of the reasons they
were segregated into all-Irish gangs and perhaps the main reason for
many of the riots of the '30s and '40s. The riot in which Stephenson
was swept up on the North Midland line in 1838 was caused, said
the Leeds Mercury, by the Irish working for 'less rate of wages.' (A
troop of artillery with a field gun was sent for, as well as the local
Yeomanry.)

In the early days, what the pay was supposed to be, even what
[177/178] you had earned, was sometimes immaterial: you got paid when the
company had money to spare. In January 1795 a meeting of the
Stratford canal was attended not only by the committee but by a
great number of navvies as well. 'Very Clamerous for the Money
due to them,' say the minutes of the meeting, 'and also being in great
distress for the want of the same. In order to preserve peace and
quietness the Committee promised them that Money should
shortly be remitted to pay them.'
The Huddersfield Narrow was an expensive waterway: only
twenty miles long but crammed with locks, aqueducts, reservoirs
and tunnels — and one of them, the Standedge, was the highest and
longest in Britain. Floods damaged the canal's banks in August 1799
and by the following March there was no money for wages. In
December the committee decided to pay in full those workmen who
were owed up to thirty pounds: men owed more than that got five
shillings in the pound.

Then, hagmen ran away. Richard Hudson abandoned his
contract on the Basingstoke canal in December 1788 and left his
men, country people, not navvies, unpaid. John Pinkerton
promised the local labourers he would re-let the work as soon as the
frosts broke: they would be able to elect their own gangers and they
would all be paid fortnightly. Simon Hamor quit the Leeds and
Liverpool in a hurry in July 1791, leaving his debts behind him.

Navvies had no redress, nor were they the stuff trade unionists
are made of.[178/179]

Sources

[Note: Full citations for works cited by the name of the author or a short title can be found in the bibliography.]

Strikes on the Lune are from PRO RAIL 844/240. Sir Charles's
despair is from The Times and Morning Chronicle n April 1793.
The Slamannan and Edinburgh strike is from the Falkirk Herald 12
March 1846. The Thirlmere strike is from the Manchester Guardian
22 Feb 1886. The Hereford and Gloucester's objections to its
employees setting up shops is from PRO RAIL 836/3. The
Woodhead chit was shown to the 1846 Committee. Truck at
Woodhead is from Chadwick's Papers.

The Riley v Warden case is from 2 Exch 59 (British Library Official
Publications). Truck at Grimsby is from the Wolverhampton
Chronicle 22 May 1850.

Earnings on the Bridgewater are from Mallet. The doubling of
canal prices in the Napoleonic War are from Hadfield and Lindsay.
The Royal Military Canal is from Vine. Wages in Bristol are from
the Kentish Gazette 6 and 9 Nov 1804. George Stephenson on the
cost of good navigators, and Palmer on what he paid them, is from
Brees. Cost of living comparison are from Burnett.

The weekly wages table is from Brassey. Ward claimed wages had
been reduced, and that contractors swindled piecemen, in his Justice
article, already mentioned. The first firms to pay seven pence an
hour nre from the Daily Dispatch 22 April 1915. Wages at Rood
End Lane are from the Blackpool Gazette News 17 Nov 1917. How
the Conciliation Board worked is from The Record (Journal of the
Transport and General Workers' Union) March 1928. That union's
success at Harwich is from the same source. Comparable yearly
earnings are from Burnen. The settlement at Hurstwood is from the
Lancashire Daily Post 11 Dec 1920.

Problems on Firbank's contract are from Brassey.
The wages riot at Rorherham is from the Leeds Mercury 13 Oct
1838. The Clamerous navvies at Stratford are from Hadfield's
Waterways to Stratford. What happened on the Huddersfield
Narrow is from PRO RAIL 838/2. The runaway hagman on the
Basingstoke is from the Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette 22
Dec 1788. The Leeds and Liverpool runaway is from PRO RAIL
846/40.